Street digger linked to a share of £5m fortune

A 71-YEAR-OLD man looks likely to share the proceeds of an art sale worth up to £5 million after he was tracked down as the descendant of a Victorian servant.

Russell Colquhoun Ryan Jr is the great-grandson of James Cullen Colquhoun, a loyal servant in the 19th-century Edinburgh household of the Dundas family, research by The Times and Lorraine Escobar, a California-based genealogist, has shown.

He is in line for the windfall after the owner of arguably the world’s finest collection of native American artefacts offered up to “tens of thousands of pounds” to anybody who could prove that they were directly descended from Mr Colquhoun, who travelled to British Columbia with his great-grandfather in the 1850s. Mr Colquhoun died in penury in San Francisco…